Existential Crisis
by heatqueen
Summary: Thirteen thinks about her impending death sentence.


**Existential Crisis**

**Summary: Thirteen thinks about her impending death sentence.**

**A/N: Rated for morbidity.**

Have you ever had a day where it really, really hit you that one day we're all going to die?I have. The day I found out I tested positive for Huntington's disease.

I suppose one never really thinks about death. Death, after all, is a morbid subject - why dwell on it when you could be concentrating on the much happier aspects of life? We go through life without considering that, at some point, it will all come to an end, that in eighty years or so we will be embraced by inevitable darkness.

We comfort ourselves with talk of an afterlife, telling ourselves that death isn't really the end of everything, that there is a place called Heaven where we will be embraced by the glory of God. Is it true? Well, no one really knows, but we humans allow ourselves to believe it on the assumption that we don't know that it isn't. Perhaps it is true, or perhaps we are all in denial, but we won't know until we do die. In which case, if the inevitable darkness version of death is right, we will _never _know.

Reality hit me the day I tested positive for Huntington's. I was forced out of denial into a dark place full of confrontations. I had to face mortality and the fact that I had a maximum of ten years left. Truth be told, it scared the living daylights out of me. I didn't want to die. Dying would mean never being able to live again, it would mean giving up my life to face an eternity of darkness. It suddenly hit me all the things I would never be able to do again once I had died. I would never be able to be a doctor again, would never laugh again, would never sleep and dream again, would never cry again. I simply wouldn't _be _again. I wouldn't exist.

I didn't want to not exist.

After my diagnosis the others said I was on a downward spiral. They told me I was stupid for doing the things I did, that I wasn't really living and needed to get a hold of myself and my life back on track. But they didn't understand why I did the things I did. None of them have ever been told that they only have ten years left to live, they don't have time limits on their lives. It's not something I could just forget - I was literally living in limbo, stuck in this lonely place in between life and death.

I'm not a psychologist but being a doctor I actually managed to put a medical term to what I was going through. It's called 'Existential Crisis', a stage of development at which an individual questions the very foundations of his or her life: whether their life has any meaning, purpose or value. Usually, it provokes the sufferer's introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the psychological repression of said awareness.

I figured: what was the point in living if we were all going to die anyway? Thus for a while I gave up trying. I was too afraid to die but didn't see the point in living, so instead of living my life I spent all my time trying desperately to drown out my thoughts and fears about my impending death sentence. In front of others I attempted to put on a brave face, acting like nothing was going on, that I was as normal as ever. At home, behind my locked front door, I spent a lot of time crying and looking at myself in the mirror, asking myself again and again why this had to happen.

And when I needed a last-ditch attempt to forget about everything, that's when I went around picking up women to bring home and have sex with. It was meaningless, it was temporary, but it provided me a few moments where I could focus on the fucking and forget about the dying. It worked - kind of. When it was over, when I lay in bed afterwards, it would all come rushing back to me and would hurt worse than it had beforehand - at which point I would cry some more and curse God for putting me through this. Not that I believed in God. Whenever I thought about death, I didn't see a tunnel to Heaven, or a bright, shining light, or my great ancestors coming to pick me up. All I could see was the blackness I so badly feared.

I wondered: of all the people in the world, why was I the one unlucky enough to be born into a body that was doomed from the day I was conceived? If souls exist, I wonder why my soul would have chosen this body out of all the newborns in the world.

But I guess I'll never find out.

Not until the day I die.


End file.
